Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday August 22, 2011 @11:10AM
from the you're-welcome dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Wall Street Journal reports on a study into productivity and efficiency in the workplace, which found that people who are given a break to surf the web return to their work with 'lower levels of mental exhaustion, boredom and higher levels of engagement.' Researchers tested against two other groups; one continued working, and one was given a break that did not involve web browsing. They concluded that 'browsing the Internet serves an important restorative function.' In contrast, dealing with personal email was 'particularly distracting.' In the end, the researchers recommended that employers loosen restrictions on employee web access."
This backs up a similar study out of Australia from a couple years ago.

While you may have posted on the wrong thread, your comment really does stand. I mean seriously, what person who works in a job requiring intelligent thought doesn't know this? It never ceases to amaze me how many managers do not get this and spend all their time telling their staff not to surf the web, but instead get the product out faster, as if the two are mutually exclusive.

Yes, and you don't treat your employees like children. Just leave them alone and the good ones will get their work done. The ones that aren't productive, are the ones you need to deal with. Get rid of them if they don't respond to a friendly reminder. Never mind penalizing everyone with rules because a few can't handle responsibility. If people have to be repeatedly told that they are supposed to get work done on company time, what the fuck good are they?

True, but most people don't think like this. Take civil service for example where there is virtually no oversight or accountability for the way time/money is spent, and for the most part the internet filters are off. If they were to poll the time spent surfing the web for personal use, the numbers would be sickening. A person who spends most of their time bullshiting is liked a whole lot more than the ones who spend all of their time getting the work done.

Yeah, we've been over this already. Just because I have 8 hours to spend at the office, doesn't mean I have 8 hours of focus to contribute.

I have more like 4 or 5 hours of focus, slightly less if I've had to sit in traffic on the way in. The remaining hours are for my inbox, lunch, surfing, defragging VMs, and so on. No matter how many different spins the "corporate efficiency experts" put on it, I only have 4 or 5 hours of focus per day. They should stop worrying what I do with the remaining time, there's nothing valuable there to be had.

I think the Europeans know this, and so I've come to realize that their 35-hour work week makes sense. I didn't always feel this way. For most of my 20s I railed against it in libertarian rage. Now I see that there is no point in asking humans to sit at the office more than 7 hours a day. It's just a waste of their leisure time, which would be better spent at home.

Having had "physical labor" jobs and "thinking" jobs I find I need much more breaks when doing "thinking" jobs. I also require more sleep. Back in the days of physical labor I could work 12-14 hour days, get 4-5 hours of sleep and be back on my feet no problem. I'm capable of having 10-12 hour days doing work that requires a lot of mental focus but that's not something I can sustain for more than about a week. And after that I need a bit of a recovery period before I'm back to normal.

Having had "physical labor" jobs and "thinking" jobs I find I need much more breaks when doing "thinking" jobs. I also require more sleep. Back in the days of physical labor I could work 12-14 hour days, get 4-5 hours of sleep and be back on my feet no problem. I'm capable of having 10-12 hour days doing work that requires a lot of mental focus but that's not something I can sustain for more than about a week. And after that I need a bit of a recovery period before I'm back to normal.

It's a function of human nature. It is well documented (or so I'm led to believe) that physical exercise leaves a person feeling better (boosted endorphins, etc, etc.) It is also well documented (again, so I'm led to believe) that the more physically fatigued you are when you finally bed down for the night, the deeper and more restful your sleep. Now, pulling 12-14 hour days with only 4-5 hours of sleep sounds like a young man's game, but studies have shown (this one I'm certain of, but I can't find sources

I think it's amazing how much energy is spent by the brain as well. After a day of having 10 word documents open, a gazillion folders and trying to do something meaningful with all that, I am really really hungry. I can eat a large lunch and feel very hungry at five thirty. Compare that with a weekend day - even one spent puzzling if it is drowsy outside. I can eat almost nothing at all. Of course, then I get home and cannot always sleep since I've just done too little to exercise my other cells (I really r

Actually the real interesting thing is that your brain only uses a couple more calories than when taxed. Physical labour requires vastly more calories yet doesn't cause near the same amount of hunger. So you are effectively over-eating.

Weird -- I'm libertarian, yet I have no problem with shorter work weeks. The shorter the better. You know, because I'm all selfish and stuff.

The libertarian issue here is: should there be a law specifying the length of the work week? Or should it be voluntary within companies and industries?

It matters. In Europe they made it a law in order to deal with that one guy at the office who, having no family, spends 80 hours a week at work. Management is too stupid to understand that the 80-hour guy is phutzing around for the first (or last) fifty hours of his week... to management, the guy seems like a motivated superstar, always at the office, alw

This is precisely the issue!!! A company voluntarily determining that a 35 hour workweek is optimum for its employees, vs a government dictating that to it. The Libertarian view is that an employer and employee are @ liberty to make any deal they like, and it's up to either one of them to decline it if terms of the agreement are not mutually acceptable. If an employer & employee mutually agree to work 20 hours, it's not like Libertarians would have any problem w/ it. Only problem is government dicta

Everybody's different, but the only thing that works for me is:1. Boss tells me "x must be done in time before y, so your deadline is at z.";2. My boss leaving me the fsck alone;3. I'm doing whatever I want to be doing, which gives me a great feeling of voluntarily chosing to do it out of myself;4. Shit get's done on time;5. Me happy, Boss happy;6. If not delivered I'm fscked, which results in healthy motivation.

Is that so hard? Why must I be dominated and baby-sitted ? In fact, who the hell thought that it

Don't know... been surfing since 9 am (it is 12:15 now) and being Monday don't feel like doing Jack...A coworker just came by and he started off with famous cliche, "So, are you working hard or hardly working?"I chuckle.We stood for the next 30 minutes discussed everything from current political realities in Middle East to the greatest newest phone gadget on a market.Yup that's how my day goes.Someone once told me that out of 8 hours we only in reality work like 1. The rest we pretend. I tend to believe that.

The thing about the earlier poster is that he probably is paid to be available. I know currently in my job, there is not a whole lot to be done so I have a lot of free time to kill (believe me I personally would much rather have meaningful work to do or not have to come in. They keep paying me for one simple reason, my services are valuable and they get a good deal on them by keeping me salaried. If I was a consultant, I would cost the company I work for a good 4 times more than I currently do. If they find my services valuable and keep me busy even 1/4 of the time, then they are making out on the deal. In exchange, I don't have to worry about the stress of trying to find work all the time and occasionally may be busy far more than 1/4 of the time. It balances out overall, but the whole idea behind salaried work is that you are paid to retain your skills, not for hours worked.

In my job as a systems, database and backup admin, if I'm doing it right there's not a tremendous work load most of the time. OTOH over my 26 years I've spent lots of time at work after hours and over holiday weekends installing upgrades or putting the systems back together when they go south. They pay me as much for my expertise as they do for my productivity.

This is quite right - if everything is running smoothly and there's not much to be done, it's a demonstration that IT are doing their job. If, OTOH, everyday IT staff have to be on the beck & call of somebody's VPN not working, or somebody's internet connection being busted, or somebody's Citrix not coming up, then I'd be less impressed about the fact that they are there busily working on the problem than the problem existing in the first place. In some cases, the problems may be because of not doing

Well your services wont be valuable to me if you check your facebook. How does that give me money?

I am not opposed to someone taking a 30 minute break every now or then once a day. That is understandable. But I do see people who work 2/3 of the day and are being paid money. Meanwhile many are out of work who would love to take these jobs and never goof off because they are thrilled just to have a job.

Buti f you paid someone to mow your lawn and they goofed for an hour wouldn't you be upset?

But if you paid someone to mow your lawn and they goofed for an hour wouldn't you be upset?

Not if the lawn got done. There is a definite task to complete, I don't care if it takes them all day and, to be honest, I wouldn't be sitting there timing them. The quicker they do the lawn, the quicker they can go and earn more money doing someone else's lawn - more fool them if they goof off.

I, however, work hard so that the company earns more money - not me. So I don't give a shit.

Yeah, but only if they're not charging you by the hour. If they are, then you certainly don't want them goofing off.

If, otoh, you were just paying them for the job, then you're right - they could take the entire day, and it's up to them when they finish it. Unless you need to go out w/ the family for a certain party, and the house needs to be empty.

You are still missing the point. I am saying that there are times when there are no tasks for me to do. If there is work that needs to be done, I do it. However, as a salaried individual, there is not always work that needs to be done. They keep me around because they want me to be available for them when they need my services. The difference between me and someone at McDonald's is that any old joe could do the job at McDonald's, so if they don't need the job for a few weeks, they fire the worker and h

Look, you either earn value for the company or you don't. Web surfing is tangential to that. I'd rather have someone who surfs but can develop an elegant design that makes the customer happy than someone who works hard all day but doesn't understand how the customer thinks and spends all that extra productive force producing the wrong thing.

It's not so different at my job, where the staff is all but begging management for work to do, and yet they're hiring more people to sit around, just in case something happens, in order to fulfill contractual obligations. Most of us have textbooks and the like at our workstations, and spend half our shifts in self-study or reading tech news sites.

I do more work on my days off than I do at work.

The two jobs I've ever had which required the most labor were a job printing blueprints, and a job serving bagel sa

Of course, in the real world, there are other concerns. This is only looking at taking short breaks on the web vs not taking short breaks or taking short breaks to check email. It is not comparing effectiveness of any other area of the workplace. People learn what is expected of them to do their job.

Perhaps management has created a perverse incentive to not work very hard? I have seen places where management behavior has pretty much convinced many people that their best course of action is to just slide by

Don't forget about it lowering the likelihood of active sexual harassment. Passive not so much if your workmate catches a look at your dong and mistakes it as hitting on her. People just gotta be discrete, yo.

In the country where I grew up, the lunch break was 2 hour long, while the class day was 4 hours in the morning and 4 in the afternoon. So you started school at 8am and finished at 6pm. That's an awful long day for north-american standards (start at 8 something and out before 2:30pm). Yet, I see an identical situation with TFA: when we returned to our class on the afternoon we were rested and had a second peak of productivity, while the kids in north-america have only one and by the time they reach 2pm, they're exhausted.

Not a part of NCLB testing, has to be cut. Teach to the test, and only teach to the test, that is all. Seriously, that's what happened.More recess, requires a major cultural change, not a minor scheduling change.

8am and finished at 6pm. That's an awful long day for north-american standardsSigh, to be back in school again.I remember the 1pm-10:30pm back to back with one class overlapping by 5 minutes. Good times.Now Working for 8:00-6:00 with an hour break is the the norm.

Biased result - what they should have done was give people a set amount of time work to do, gave them the same amount of money, and then measured the productivity of the two groups. Instead, they put the first group to work for the full 30 minutes and then gave the second group 20 minutes of work, a break to browse the web for 10 minutes, then 10 more minutes of work. A break gives you more productivity on tedious tasks like highlighting every letter 'e' in a Word document? Duh! At least it was done in Singapore so we know no U.S. tax dollars were spent on such an obvious conclusion.

How about people who don't work at all but screw around on the web all day? Giving them the same amount of money for work or no work would answer that question. I know for a fact some people will sit around all day at work commenting on their friends' facebook status, checking twitter, watching Youtube with headphones on, and reading celebrity news. Heck, I've done my fair share of wasting time, too..."Honest boss, I need to check Slashdot all day to...uh...stay current in tech trends!" (to be fair this was back in 2001 when this website was a different place)

I'm a planner, mostly. I think of ways to fix problems and improve my company's network systems. Not only is reading Slashdot "productive" for me, so is sitting around at home watching a movie and eating popcorn.

The point is, I'm paid salary, not hourly. It doesn't matter how much time I'm given, I just have to complete all tasks, period. So, if I want to show up at work and screw around on Slashdot, or Google+ or whatever, it means nothing. Either my job gets done or not. If it continually doesn't ge

not that i am complaining, as this is exactly how i use slashdot (he said, posting from work), and i think this is true of most other people here

slashdot would materially suffer from a workplace that blocked outside surfing

i would further add that the articles i read on slashdot have benefited me at work, such as with the recent spate of articles covering development on the android: i bring these subjects up in meetings with my coworkers and superiors and employees under me

the web at work is not about porn or gambling sites. unfortunately, that's the only way some management views the issue. you can walk a middle road: black list sites of only a certain nature. for example: block porntube.com, don't block cnn.com

furthermore, if you do have an employee looking at porn or gambling from work, you are dealing with someone whose comfort level with certain kinds of transgressions at work that they are probably transgressing in other ways at work as well. meaning, blocking their web access is not the way to deal with them, and doesn't solve the problem of the other possible transgressions they are probably engaging in, perhaps against the company. keep an eye at them at least, or better yet, terminate them. anyone surfing porn or gambling from work has issues

A few years back I discovered the head of HR at my work was looking at porn on a nearly daily basis. Sure explained why he stayed really late all the time. This was resolved with a basically "don't do that" when the rest of HR and senior management were made aware of it. No repercussions or anything. Fast forward a couple years and there are a few people at some of our different locations looking at porn. Some of these were people who were not surfing but had just received email with pictures or links from

this seems to be the increasing tenor in this country (or my country, if you are not posting from the usa): classism. class warfare is of course the next step. unfortunate, but people denied equal treatment because of their income have to fight back some way to reaffirm the fairness owed them, the double standards

the right has even openly embraced classism as the new "morality" for america: "i got mine already, so screw you". "you're poor? sorry, no healthcare or education for you". get your money and sc

anyone gambling or surfing porn from work is not performing. i's like the hilarious lie that heroin addicts should be allowed to take heroin if they can still perform at work and maintain their relationships. such people don't exist!

I can think of a number of times I've gotten stuck on a scripting problem, distracted myself on the web for a couple of minutes, then come back and have had the solution become clear to me. I don't really know why this happens but I suspect it's because I'm willing to dump where I'm at and start over from the beginning to look for the problem. Im not sure how much sense that makes so I'll put it another way: I needed a mental reboot.

I don't personally believe productivity takes any real hit from web broswing. Even if it did, I think the info that is gathered from it can make up or even exceed that gap. I had a boss ding me once for talking to someone on ICQ. A month or two later he needed me to find some info. I knew the dude from ICQ had experience with that particular product and he was kind enough to fill me in. My boss was reasonable enough to take back the comment he made.

I can think of a number of times I've gotten stuck on a scripting problem, distracted myself on the web for a couple of minutes, then come back and have had the solution become clear to me. I don't really know why this happens but I suspect it's because I'm willing to dump where I'm at and start over from the beginning to look for the problem. Im not sure how much sense that makes so I'll put it another way: I needed a mental reboot.

I/. (and other sites) and also go on walkabouts. Main difference is on/. there is a permanent record on an optical disk (I probably fill a DVD-R all by myself) in some dusty warehouse of every click and every keystroke I ever made, whereas WRT my walkabouts, the carpet is microscopically more worn. Guess which gets documented on the review...

The other issue is that frankly I get a heck of a lot of ideas by surfing the web. There's surfing Ruby sites/blogs, which they may as well catagorize along with m

I know what you mean. I had a job once where they placed my desk right in the hallway. All day I could hear virtually every conversation that was going on, not to mention the constant bombardment of phantom footsteps walking by. To top it off, I sat next to the laser printer, so everybody'd come up and say hi to me. Eventually I got a CD player and a pair of headphones. Finally I could work in peace! My boss dinged me for looking like I wasn't paying attention.

That's at work where I don't manage anything. The list is dynamic except for the social sites.

My mail server has deny and block methods dating to 1993. Not just blacklists and up blocks but dynamic stuff and intrusion scripts that block stuff variably. I know just ham-handed denies are pointless, but at work they also do DLP and watch every byte looking for patterns that match confidential data. If they see data leaked out in the field, they go back and see if it was seen leaving us.

Every now and then I'll decide that I need to work harder to get ahead, so I'll completely swear off the internet for a day. By 11 am I'll have noticed that I've just been staring at the diagram without doing anything for 30 minutes. Something to break up the monotony is very important.

In these jobs I made $15,000 a year. Shouldn't I work even harder if I make $40,000 a year?

Um... No.

You should, however, provide more value to your employer, exercise a high demand skill that is in relatively low supply, create value, etc. People who ask "you want fries with that?" in exchange for $7 an hour should clue in that literally any idiot can do that, and if they want more, they are going to have to distinguish themselves somehow.

Of course, your first problem seems to be that you are laboring under the delusion that life is (or is supposed to be) fair. Never was, and is not likely to b

... your first problem seems to be that you are laboring under the delusion that life is (or is supposed to be) fair. Never was, and is not likely to become so before you or I die.

On the other hand, one should not let the existence of this state of unfairness become the excuse for not attempting to destroy it, for doing nothing to mitigate its effects, or, worse, for promoting it as a good.

... your first problem seems to be that you are laboring under the delusion that life is (or is supposed to be) fair. Never was, and is not likely to become so before you or I die.

On the other hand, one should not let the existence of this state of unfairness become the excuse for not attempting to destroy it, for doing nothing to mitigate its effects, or, worse, for promoting it as a good.

At age 43, I have despaired of hope that I will make a significant change in the "state of fairness" for myself, or my children. I do attempt to deal with those immediately around me in a fair manner, but I'm not taking any significant hits to the family wealth by giving it away because it is unfair that others have less. No matter what your station in life, there are always others who have less, well, at least that's true for 99.9999999% of every Billion people.

How is that different from me taking money from the cash register at my previous jobs?

Full time at your previous jobs created less value than part timers created at the 40k job. That's how it's different. I used to feel the same way, but some people really do create more value than others. Who cares if the roadie is working longer hours than the rock star? The rock star's the one bringing in the ticket sales to pay for both of them.

But if people work twice as hard and productivity increases, wouldn't that make it necessary for companies to hire even fewer workers, and increase unemployment even more?

I get what you are saying, but the McDonalds to the current office job is a difference b/w work hard, and work smart. In Mickie D's, no real thinking is required, and all that's required there is your presence, and your doing all the jobs you're required to - flipping the burgers, making sure that the next batch of fries are underway,

Did you just pick random articles from a google search?:p One of them actually concludes using the internet can increase productivity and its hard to measure how much it affects it. Another says that social networks can increase productivity but that it can make you distant to your friends and possibly reduce engagement that way. And the other 2 articles are just business guidelines with no data.